Fake Steve Jobs Gets a Sitcom Deal

Reporter Nitasha Tiku covers technology, finance, green business, and social entrepreneurship for Inc. magazine and contributes to the staff?s daily links blog. Her work has appeared in New York magazine, The Villager, Chelsea Now, and on nymag.com. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Tips from Inc.'s GrowCo Conference. Following up a day that included presentations by Jim McCann, George Foreman, and Amy Simmons of Amy's Ice Cream, Inc's GrowCo conference wrapped up on Tuesday with advice from the entrepreneurs behind Rosetta Stone, Method, and College Hunks Hauling Junk. Tom Adams, Rosetta Stone's CEO, told the story of his company's recent IPO and encouraged attendees to "dream big." "If I can do it," he said, "anybody can." Eric Ryan, co-founder of the home cleaning supply company Method, said that if you are a business owner who doesn't consider yourself a marketer, the rise of social media will prove you wrong. "Everyone needs to think like marketers now." And College Hunks Hauling Junk co-founder Nick Friedman advised entrepreneurs to pay attention to the little things when building company culture. "Sit down with your employees at least once a quarter," he said. "And remember to say 'Thank you."

Fake Steve Jobs gets a sitcom deal with a Seinfeld alum. Dan Lyons, author of the satirical blog The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, is teaming up with writer Larry Charles (of Seinfeld, Entourage, and Curb Your Enthusiasm fame) to make a half-hour series called iCON that takes place in--and presumably makes fun of--Silicon Valley tech culture, reports Mashable. The show will air on EPIX, via each of its distribution channels: cable TV, steaming video, and VOD. We have a feeling this will be good for a few yuks.

12 myths about starting a business debunked. As the saying goes, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Anyone who has ever started a business because they believed it would give them more free time or that they wouldn't have to answer to anybody probably quickly learned how mistaken they were. Business Pundit takes a closer look into those and 10 other myths surrounding the pros and cons of starting a business. As they discover, a number of longstanding beliefs about what you "have to do" to launch a successful venture are simply just so much hooey. So the next time someone tells you that you must have a great idea to launch a successful business or that every entrepreneur needs to take dangerous risks, you'll know what you're really getting into.

Gigaom finds entrepreneurial stereotypes on display at SXSW. What was the explicit wisdom of the Seed Combinators panel at this week's SXSW? According to GigaOm's Stacey Higginbotham, it was that tech startup founders are male, 27-years-old, and residents of Silicon Valley. The panel, which included Paul Graham from Y Combinator, David Cohen from TechStars, and Naval Ravikant of Venture Hacks often answered questions as though the default identity of a startup founder was a young male, says Higginbotham. When someone asked why older founders aren't accepted, they were told that it's less likely to find two older co-founders that are both willing to uproot themselves and put it all on the line for a new venture. As for female founders, 1 in 10 women in the audience would be an exaggeration. But rather than lamenting their absence, Higginbotham advises the panelists to ask themselves "what is it about these programs that either make it difficult for them to accept women or make women not even bother to apply (or show up for panels on the topic)?"

6 ways to build your business. If you're looking to expand your business, Verne Harnish has 6 solid tips for covering bases such as branding, financing, and leadership strategy (via CNN Money). Most notably, the consultant and creator of MIT's Birthing of Giants executive program advises CEOs to get the edge on their competitors. How? "Look at your industries biggest cost and time constraints and challenge the conventional thinking in those areas of the business." One strategy for expanding your business that Harnish overlooks, however, is to employ student consultants.

An case for wireless broadband. Fred Wilson makes it. The FCC recently released a plan to auction off television spectrum to companies that would provide high speed Internet access to rural areas. Wilson likes the idea--"The fact is that wires, fiber, and cable aren't going to get us where we need to go," he writes--but he argues that instead of auctioning off spectrum the government should be make it available for free to anyone who wants it. "So what I'd like to see in the National Broadband Plan is to make that entire 500mhz available as unregulated spectrum where anyone and everyone can build technologies, devices, markets, and businesses in it," he writes. "I believe if we did that, instead of auctioning it off to several large established wireless carriers, we would see the kinds of gains our country needs to improve our broadband infrastructure."

Five things social media still hasn't tackled. Despite all the innovations made through social media, there are still a few quandaries the great minds behind sites like Facebook and Twitter have yet to unravel, according to the Harvard Business Review. Juggling hundreds or thousands of contacts on different social media accounts, for example, can become exhausting, and calls for a tool to help with syncing and organizing. And though most social networking sites have internal search functions, online search engines still lack integration that can help keep up profiles and status updates. ""When Google search knows what I want to see based on who I'm friends with on Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare -- and more crucially, who I pay attention to -- then it will get interesting," the writer adds.

How to make a conference pay off. Returning from Inc.'s GrowCo, grow your company conference, which ended yesterday, or another professional event might seem like a good time to rest and do laundry rather than follow-up on what you've learned. So rest and do laundry. But after that, make sure you follow up with Web Worker Daily's five steps to profiting from a conference.